Menu

trauma

i am not broken. i am not damaged. i have been changed, due to trauma, and i can be changed in other, better directions if i work at it.

i am allowed to change. i am a river. i am changing course because that’s what rivers do.

i am not disgusting. i am different.

i am not responsible for you. and you are not responsible for me.

i do not need a modern horoscope like a myers-briggs test to tell me that i am not like you. we are not the same. nobody is the same. one twin is outgoing. both twins change.

maybe today i feel like a doll with its legs splayed at impossible angles. maybe today i feel like the hollows under my eyes. maybe today i feel like an empty hand. maybe yesterday i was doing pretty well but i picked it back up again today. maybe today i feel like nothing can ever change. but it always does. it always gets better.

maybe today i was going to kill myself, but then i found this half-written prose-poem about how i am a river and i remembered my banks and my reeds and how i will look next week when i can see the sun.

or, if it’s helpful for you to think of yourself as sick, how many people in your life know you are sick?

i have been thinking about disclosure and stigma.

i think of myself as a person who actively tries to fight against stigma re: mental health issues, and i am trying to learn a radical mental health perspective so i can be kinder to myself, and yet i totally rarely disclose my issues to people who they may seriously affect when those people are connected to me professionally. i thought about this a lot recently, and then i couldn’t stop thinking about polarized: life from both sides entry about “the differences between secrets and lies”.

this person, like me, feels like being out as bipolar would negatively impact peoples’ opinions of our abilities.

in that sense, i think that shame is a much larger part of my life than i tend to think it is. i think in some ways, some people like us are controlled by shame.

i realized i am completely terrified of coming out of the closet about most of my issues to the people it affects the most. it isn’t politically correct to hate gay people, but it’s expected that people will exclude “crazy people” from their inner circles of friendship. i can say i’ve dated different genders before with no hesitation, and yet i’m terrified to come out as a nutcase to people i don’t know well, people i know professionally, and yes – even friends.

at what point do you tell the person you’re sweet on about your issues?
do you wait for them to like you for who you are, and then hope they don’t run once you both like each other? at what point is it a blatant lie to omit this information? how many dates can you have before you mention just how different it is to know you long-term?
“i seem eccentric but otherwise pretty normal on our dates, right? haha fooled you! because as soon as you leave my house, i cry for hours/talk to voices/throw up/cut myself/get wasted/sleep for two days/freak out completely/get sad for a week.”

is it ethical to withhold that information from a potential housemate, a potential employer, a new friend, a drinking buddy, or a new lover?

what if you know for a fact that someone doesn’t respect a radical perspective on mental health, and you know that they would try to encourage you to ruin your life with electro-shock, or toxic medications, if you’re a person who chooses to live without them? what if you know they will lose respect for you, or begin to walk on eggshells around you, or break up with you, or fire you? or just treat you a little differently from then on, like all of a sudden they pity you?

on the other hand, as adults, we have the luxury of autonomy in many parts of our lives. will stigma ever lift if nobody’s “out of the closet” about our experiences? how will people know to treat me with kindness if they do not know about my abusive childhood? perhaps, paradoxically, ‘normal’ people are -less- inclined to write off my behaviors as ‘crazy’ if they know not to take them personally. maybe it would give people empathy and perspective. perhaps coming out would fling open a door to a community of others like me.
…or perhaps it would leave me even lonelier, cut off from “normal people”… whose world i don’t fit into, anyhow.

mad pride is such an incredible movement. i would like to think that i am working towards a point where i can feel proud of myself as a creative, resourceful, wild, compassionate, rad, somewhat not-the-stupidest, messy and magickal little moodmonster and not feel like a gigantic fucking mess, like a person imprisoned by a broken mind. like it could be okay to be a little sadlet sadding along some days because i am not my sadness – i am a writer, i am a body, i am a cooker of foods and a brightener of days. and i should be proud of who i am – mental health hiccups and all – and you should, too.

because, overall, you are pretty fucking amazing.

so, what about you? are you “out” to everyone? what do you think about stigma and disclosure?

radical communities have been on this “sex-positive” tip for a long time now.

i don’t feel like a sex-positive person.
in fact… i think i’m sex-negative.

i can already hear it:
WHAT?
YOU’RE NOT SEX-POSITIVE?
YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN HEALTHY SEXUALITY, IN CONSENT, IN A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO BE BOLD AND INDEPENDENT?
YOU HATE WOMEN?
YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN SAFER SEX? YOU WANT EVERYONE TO GET STD’S?
YOU’RE A SLUT-SHAMER?
AREN’T YOU EMBARRASSED TO BE A WOMAN AND SAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT?
SEX IS GOOD FOR YOU!

here’s the disgusting truth:sex positive communities do not always respect people who choose to abstain.

i have had friends lash out at their “prudish, Victorian, hopeless, sexless, celibate, tight-ass vanilla friends and family” with me in the room, unaware how shaming it is to have your “sex-positive” friends be so negative about your sexuality.

I WAS MOLESTED FOR A GOOD PART OF MY CHILDHOOD.

I DO NOT ALWAYS FEEL POSITIVELY ABOUT SEX.

i do not always feel positively about my own sexuality, i don’t usually care about others’ wild sex lives, and i am certainly never going to feeling positively about a culture that places SUCH A STRONG EMPHASIS ON SEX.

i told this to one of my best friends, who is a sex worker and understandably a good deal of her life is dedicated to fighting peoples’ negative stereotypes about this kind of work. as well it should be. it’s important to her for her friends to know that she is in control of her body and her sexuality, and she is proud of it. she isn’t forced to do it. she doesn’t have a controlling pimp. in fact, her profession allows her a lot more flexibility (no pun intended) than most corporate jobs. i respect her right to wear whatever she likes, and to choose any job she likes, including sucking someone’s cock for rent money. i don’t care what she does. i’m not going to call her a slut, or stop respecting her. i do not believe sex is a sin. but why is it a sin for me to be different?

it’s not like i never attempted your “free love” lifestyle.
it just doesn’t fulfill me emotionally or sexually.
but i think you should do whatever makes you happy.

because of this, people always tell me, “oh, come on, that’s different, you’re still sex-positive, it’s not like you think everyone should be ‘little house on the prairie’ all the time.”

but what if a “sex-positive” person DID have a friend with “traditional” views of sex? what if that WAS my perspective? what if i WAS influenced by a judeo-christian narrative that holds female sexuality as powerful and therefore potentially dangerous? what if i DID find sex to be a sacred covenant between two people who want to connect more deeply? would that be sex-negative? would i be an enemy? why are traditional perspectives acceptable to mock?

& why does nobody in the sex-positive community seem to care that they are making so many survivors of sexual trauma feel bad and guilty about their “boring, sexless, tight-ass” sex lives?

as though the world is divided in two: educated sexually liberated people, and those of us neanderthals who are too stupid to free themselves.

i am fortunate to have worked through my issues enough that i no longer feel i want to throw up when forced to deal with “sex-positive” culture. but i am fortunate. and many are not so fortunate.

you want to make THE ESTABLISHMENT uncomfortable, because you think anyone who doesn’t want to see your ass is a tool of THE MAN and hates what your autonomy represents, but the honest truth is there are tons of feminists, survivors, and other people who do not want to see your ass. and that does not make us oppressors.

not wearing booty-shorts to the queer dance party not only marks me as hopelessly lame – it means i hate women, too?that makes it sound like you want to control me and my sexuality – and isn’t the point of your “sex-positive community” to FIGHT AGAINST THAT?

we are all trying to survive this insane culture that doesn’t let women create their own path.
don’t make it worse.
if you’re TRULY sex-positive, you will respect how damaged many of us are from sexual trauma and sexual violence, and stop judging your ‘prude’ friends.

EDIT JUNE 2015

been thinking about this a lot, and coincidentally, ran into some pretty brilliant critiques of “sex-positive feminism” that i didn’t touch on here.

“What’s wrong with the generalization that more sex = liberation? It locates sexual liberation in an experience of white heterosexual femininity. It does not take into the account the different experienes of racialization and sexualization of women and queer people of color. While straight middle-class women may have been stereotyped as pure, asexual virgins, women of color were hypersexualized as exotic, erotic beings (see hottentot, harem girl, lotus blossom, fiery Latina, squaw, etc.) For women of color and queer POC, adopting a sex-positive attitude does not “liberate” them of such stereotypes, in fact, it fuels them further. In addition, sex-positivity does not offer a critique of capitalism and the way our sexualities are commodified and exploited, preventing ‘free expression’ of sex, in the favorite words of sex-positive feminists.” – counterstorytelling: sex positivity isn’t so positive

a person who puts on a happy face in front of company? that’s fake. that person is being inauthentic. yet the person who’s asked “happy birthday, how are you?” and responds, “i have been obsessed with the fact that, turning 30, my first suicide attempt was 17 years ago” is not going to be the most popular person at the party.

our culture demands we be fake.

anything real is scorned.

we love artificial! we love unnatural!

women are not hairless, yet the reality of women having hair disgusts us. we demand that women shave, tweeze, wax. we demand this fantasy, this collective delusion.

men do not exist in a vacuum without emotion, yet they are expected to bottle everything up, and put on a drag act of masculinity. that’s what’s expected. we demand the fantasy of the their unassailable strength.

every part of our culture rewards bullshitting. how many women would sleep with a man who approached them and said, “please have sex with me”? even women like me who are aware that it is a game are turned off by this unwillingness to follow absurd and manipulative social convention.

“rudeness” is often someone being honest or real in a socially unacceptable way.

when someone asks you how you are, your culture forbids you from honesty. you’re not supposed to say, “i am worried about my parents’ mortality.” you are not supposed to say, “i feel i haven’t accomplished enough by age 30.” you’re not supposed to say, “youth is currency and i’m growing poor.” & you’re definitely not supposed to say, “i’m extremely alone, i have no community, i think my sadness is actually a deep mental illness that is spiraling out of my control and i have nowhere to turn, i have alienated nearly every one of my friends, and i’m constantly contemplating whether or not my consciousness has a right to life.”